The Internet has enabled the delivery of electronic content to billions of people. Some entities maintain content delivery exchanges that allow different content providers to reach a wide online audience. Different content providers have different goals in distributing their respective content items through the content delivery exchanges. A content delivery exchange allocates resources to each content provider. The manner in which the resources are consumed may be different depending on the goals. If resource allocation and consumption relative to different content items is not fair or accurate, then content items from some content providers may be treated unfairly by either consuming too many resources and or not being distributed through the content delivery exchange as frequently as is justifiable. Also, one possible approach to attempt to ensure fairness is too computationally expensive to perform in a selection process that should only take a few hundred milliseconds.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.